New spacecraft designed to penetrate the surface of icy moons

BBC : Engineers in the UK have successfully tested a new type of space probe called a penetrator. Rather than slow down and land on a planet’s surface, the craft is designed to slam into it and penetrate to a depth of up to 3 m. To simulate what it would encounter on Jupiter’s moon Europa, the penetrator was fired at a 10-ton cube of ice. The 20-kg projectile hit the icy surface at a speed of 340 m/s, just under the speed of sound at Earth’s surface. Although the impact reduced the ice to a huge pile of snow, the penetrator’s payload, which is protected by a special spring mechanism, came through unscathed. “It was really successful because the entry velocity was higher than expected and all the systems we’ve looked at so far have survived,” said Marie-Claire Perkinson, the program’s industrial leader from Astrium, an aerospace company. The engineers expect to have the system ready by the end of the decade, although the mission it was originally proposed for was cancelled.